Complex calculations can often be broken into discrete stages where, at the later stages, the results of earlier stages are effectively constant. Typically, the later stages may be more computationally expensive than the earlier stages. When this occurs, the computation may be referred to as a “stage imbalanced computation.”
A multi-frequency computation is a stage imbalanced computation where the later stages are used to generate an increasingly large dataset by performing many calculations on an initial dataset. Examples of multi-frequency computations include many commonly used image processing and general signal processing computations. An example multi-frequency computation may include a later stage that sets every pixel in an input image to a color that was calculated in an earlier stage.